


fic: Hold On To What You Believed In the Light

by lonewytch



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Introspection, Meta, Pond Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-31
Updated: 2012-08-31
Packaged: 2017-11-13 06:51:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/500695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonewytch/pseuds/lonewytch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by Part 5 of Pond Life, the impact of the Doctor on the Pond's lives and what brought Rory to his actions at the end of the ep. A story about stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fic: Hold On To What You Believed In the Light

Hope is important.

Here’s a story about hope. Rory and Amy Pond weave their way from dawn until nightfall, their feet passing over the surface of the Earth, their lives lived only within its shallow sphere. They go from their mornings to their dusks, and are extraordinary in only ordinary ways. The sun rises in the East and clean light slants through their bedroom window, cutting a line across their bed. They laugh, love and dream, and the future is an unfilled plain of possibility. The sun sets in the West and the garden is bathed in the dusk-light, deepening into the blur of darkness. Amy and Rory sleep. Then they repeat the cycle over again. They move and grow, adapt and change like the seasons, they shape themselves to each other. 

That is how it should be, maybe. But it’s not. That’s just a story about the happy endings that people hope there will be.

Here’s the real story. For Rory Williams, hope is important. Because a hundred little things strip away the semblance that this Earth is all there is, that this life is actually his and that it is a life which will end at all well. He suspects that for Amy, these little things strip away the fact that this life they have here together could be a wonderful thing, if they let it. But nothing is normal, almost  in the same way that nothing in dreams is normal. Normality fled too long ago for Rory to recall what it felt like. He reaches for it, nonetheless, amidst the interruptions and the chaos. It chases its own tail around and out of his fingertips and he finds he’s just grasping on smoke, his fingers aching against the air.

There are calls late at night, the phone startling him from sleep and Amy from his embrace. There is huff and wheeze of the Tardis materialising in the back garden, the flowers ruined for the fourth time this year; the nimbus of displaced air as She stirs up the dust of a summer that lasted too long. Random aliens appear in different parts of the house. Rambling excuses are left on the answerphone, the words sending bitterness through Rory’s veins. 

A hundred little things keep on happening, and the steady drip drip drip of them wears Rory away. They forge a groove into his spirit that settles into him. He can feel it inside his stomach; sometimes it’s the harsh light of panic, sometimes it’s a dull sadness. He doesn’t know what it is, only that it’s getting deeper, and that soon he may split in two.

One day, there is a pop and whizz and a bustle of light and sound as the Doctor clambers out of the hard lines of his ship, bizarre contraption in hand, wires tangling at his feet as he trips and falls. Amy laughs and Rory forces a smile, a drying crack across the face of his indifference. 

River visits. Rory watches her laugh and flick her hair (so like Amy), and part of him sees only what was ripped from him twice over, a girl lost amidst her childhood dreams and a tool honed to kill the Doctor. He thinks might understand that last one, but pushes the thought away as if it’s broken glass.

A hundred little things, leaching his energy and hardening his spirit. 

The Doctor turns up black with soot, blood pouring from a gash above his eye, face a mask of violent red, three of his fingers broken. Rory patches him up and nurses him. The Timelord will not speak for five days. He is wrapped in grief and despondency; it hangs from him like black smoke and drifts through their household chasing happiness out into the street and tangling itself round their windows and doors. Amy is beside herself. Eventually, the Doctor opens his mouth only to tell Amy that there are some things he wishes he had never seen, before pushing her gently away and staggering back into the Tardis. 

There are trips out to the stars. The running inevitable, the glory and the wonder ever-present  - but yet never really sinking into Rory’s skin any more. How much Time can a person cram into their life, Rory wonders, before they are stretched too thin across the years? Before their very substance is blown away, smoke in wind against the roar of the vortex? The threat, as always, is there. Danger upon danger, brushing over them, too close to them. Rory feels numb to it, sheathed in apathy. How many near escapes can someone have before they are extinguished completely? They will die young, Rory can feel it in his bones, the truth scribbling its way across their white surface. 

Here is a story about how they die. Hope is irrelevant here.

A hundred little things, and hope begins to pool and drain away. Amy will never let go, there will never be time for her and Rory. Every child they have will be beholden to the stars and to the legacy of the Doctor. Rory and Amy Pond meet their end in a chaos of blood and smoke, while the Raggedy Man with the kind eyes screams his grief out in the electric air of a dying starship. Their deaths are witnessed only by the one who led them there, their bodies are consumed in the mass of metal and fire, spun out into space in pieces.

But that’s just a story about the sad endings nobody wants. 

Still, Rory hopes. Hope is important. If people only knew - he thinks - some would call Amy and Rory Pond special, chosen, blessed. But then, some would call them cursed and look at the tatters of their life through a lens of grey. Perhaps some would call them legends, myths, and their story would weave their way onto pages and into minds. Rory doesn’t really know. He just hopes that one day they will be able to live a life as close to normal as can be lived, after everything they’ve been through.

It’s a dream, a wish, a story not yet written, a story he knows by heart.


End file.
